"Nothing short of an aroused public can change things; nothing less than democracy is at stake." - Bill Moyers

April 25, 2007

Uncanny Parallels

Last night on PBS, the show Independent Lens outlined the Enron scandal. As the story unfolded, I saw more and more parallels with the Bush administration to date. Of course, this isn’t tremendously surprising, given the close friendships back in the late 1990’s between both Bushes and the top executives of Enron.As noted during the program, as the house of cards began to crumble during the first months of the 21st century, ‘All the Bush administration had to do to help Enron was—nothing. That was something they did very well.’

In the midst of the study on Enron, the producer of the show noted the parallels between Enron and the Milgram study [see 4/20 below] as I have been noting for years on both my blogs as regards the Bush administration, the resemblances were uncanny. I found it interesting to say the least: that two completely different entities [the producers of the program and myself] recognized the parallels between these two scandals and a study which, though well known among select professions back in the 1960’s, has been essentially out of public awareness for decades, now.

Today, I believe, this country is, increasingly, resembling a house of cards—just as Enron did six years ago. Bush and Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and Rice, are the top executives. The Cabinet and the West Wingers who implement the policies of the administration are the traders whose practices were being winked at by those executives. They’re also the equivalent of Arthur Andersen, cooking the books. Most of the Republicans and some of the Democrats in Congress make up the next tier of execs who knew and didn’t know what was happening. The vast majority of people of this country are the rank-and-file employees who placed their trust in the company [country] and are shut out as the execs take their huge bonuses, sell their stocks and fleece the company [country].

I was also interested to note, as I did some further research into the parallels in preparation for writing this post, as BBC and other publications reported back in 2002, G. W. Bush was very quick to denounce his erstwhile ‘friends’ and demand investigations into the scandals. The man who demands loyalty from those around him demonstrates precious little of that commodity to others.